In this week’s mini-episode, our guest is Melissa Bryne, a senior political and community organizer who is focused on canceling student debt and making education free for all. Melissa tells Nikki why the suggestion to cancel $50k in student debt should only be a starting place.

In our interview she says, “Joe Biden doesn’t need anybody’s permission to cancel federal student loan debt. Congress has already granted the authority to the executive branch to cancel federal student loan debt.”

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Transcript

Nikki Nolan: Hey, Matter of Life & Debt-ers, it’s me, Nikki Nolan . I am bringing you a mini-episode with Melissa Byrne. She is a political organizer focused on canceling student debt.

And this week senators announced a movement in the direction of student loan cancellation, so I wanted to bring on Melissa to discuss what has been going on. She will be on a later full episode.
Enjoy this mini-episode.

Welcome to the podcast! It is so good to have you here.

Melissa Byrne: I am so happy to be here. I am very, very excited for this mini-episode and kind of a sneak preview of what we’re going to talk about later in the month.

Nikki Nolan: While we have you here, I would love to know who you are and what you’ve been up to lately?

Melissa Byrne: So my name’s Melissa, I do a lot of work around canceling student loan debt and making college free. And I have recently been up to, looking to see what this administration is doing to kickstart this work.

Nikki Nolan: That’s awesome. What has been going on with, student loan forgiveness and free education in the U.S.

Melissa Byrne: Oh, I mean, it’s a hot mess but, fortunately, we’ve been almost a year into a pause on it – paying your federal student loans. And the interest rates have been dropped to zero. And on the first day of the Biden administration, one of the first things that he did was extend the pause on federal student loan payments until at least October.

And what’s great about that is it gives us the opportunity to win cancellation of student loans and use the energy around cancellation to build up to be able to get free college. And then recently this week, the press secretary, Jen Psaki, tweeted that the administration is exploring many forms of cancellation, including administrative and legislative relief.

And this came on the heels of Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley and Alma Adams, and a few others doing a presser to reintroduce their resolution, calling on the President to use executive authority, to cancel federal student loan debt.

Nikki Nolan: How long have you been working within, sort of, this field?

Melissa Byrne: I have been working on trying to cancel student loan debt and make college free since August of 2010 when I went to a meeting for work and got called out in the middle of the meeting and I’ll tell the whole story next time. This is a bit of a taste- and I left that meeting, realizing that having student loan debt wasn’t my fault, it was a structural problem.

And I realized that I needed to use my organizing skills to free us of this.

Nikki Nolan: What has been the impact of student loan debt on your life?

Melissa Byrne: Not being able to save up to buy a condo or house or the flexibility around jobs, and all the basic things that you would have if you went to college . And this is what many of my peers that have debt have also experienced. And especially 10, 15 years ago, people didn’t really talk about their student loan debt, and so now people talk about it a lot more. So you see a lot more people resisting it and calling it out.

Nikki Nolan: Do you still have student loan debt?

Melissa Byrne: I do. I still have my federal debt, which I think is around $30k and then I also had a lot of private student loan debt. And what happened was a couple of years into me being outspoken on the student loan crisis and everything that was happening, Sallie Mae split into Navient and Sallie Mae.

And at that time I was in default and I hadn’t paid in about three years. So I was getting to the point where the company had to decide whether they would sue me for my loans or just write off the debt. And so they literally called me and said they were afraid of me using the discovery process against them.

So they chose not to sue me. And so basically I still have- I think it’s $80k or $90k on the books, but they can’t ever collect it because they gave up their right to sue under the Fair Credit Collections Act.

The only protection that people with private student loans have is the Fair Credit Collections Act which limits the timeline of when companies can sue you for collection. So they have to, based on your state, it’s either three to four years from the last time of payment, they have to either do a lawsuit or they can’t ever collect on the debt again.

Going back 40 years, Republicans have been defunding education. I mean, hello, great Ronald Reagan. That was the whole thing. I mean, we had free college in California.

And then he got rid of it in California and started moving to a tuition-based model. And then throughout the whole country, these right-wingers just chipped away and decided that funding tax cuts for the rich were more important than funding basic-services education.

Nikki Nolan: Winter actually talked a little bit about this, about Reagan introducing tuition. And I actually talked with my grandma after that and she was a professor in New York city and she was – I remember when they started institutionalizing tuition there which was, I think, after California started doing it.

And then I talked with a woman who was in England and she said over the last few years, England has started institutionalizing tuition. It just seems – when they go from free to institutionalizing tuition seems a pivotal point in which it starts this catastrophe, but I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.

Melissa Byrne: No. I mean, it’s definitely part of it. And then that the neo-liberals in the nineties had this great idea that it’s okay to run up the debt because you’ll make enough money in your career to compensate for this debt.

One, they didn’t realize that the job market doesn’t always work that way. And two, this idea that if you’re poor or working class, you should have to pay a class mobility tax in the form of a debt. And so basically what they’re doing through student loan debt is saying, fine, we’ll begrudgingly let you into higher education, but you’re just not going to benefit economically from it for at least 15 to 20 years.

And then, it makes it so kids of the wealthy don’t have to compete at the same level with poor and working class kids because they will always have an economic advantage.

For example, black women hold the most amount of debt. And that- this is why canceling is to wound that as a racial justice issue. And if we want to close the racial wealth gap, canceling the debt is one way to do that.

I just throw back at people that if you grew up poor and you went to med school, why should you be penalized? If you grew up poor and became a dentist, why should you be penalized? If you’re a middle-class and became a dentist, why should you be penalized? And don’t we want dentists to be able to do more general dentistry as opposed to high-paying specialties to cover their $600k student loan debt?

One challenge is people from think tanks get nervous because the numbers are so big. So there’ll be – just cancel $50k of debt per person. And I don’t support that way. The resolution that the Senate entered Schumer and Warren is the $50k. And I’m framing that as $50k is the floor. That’s the least amount that we can cancel, and we want to do it all.

I’m framing it with the White House as we’re negotiating between full federal loan cancellation and $50k cancellation.

The super wealthy people that I immediately make high wages from MBA programs or law school, they’ve already refilled with Sofi or Common Bond down to a 1% interest rate. So they’re not even in this pool, so they’re already out of the pool. So it’s all people that need the debt cancel that are eligible for cancellation.

Nikki Nolan: Within this sort of cancellation thing, it is only going towards federal debts. There is no talk about the private?

Melissa Byrne: Joe Biden doesn’t need anybody’s permission to do that federal student loan debt. So the Congress has already granted the authority to the executive branch to cancel federal student loan debt. And that’s just the direct loans.

If you’re listening to this podcast, and you went to college before 2010, you probably have FFEL loans, the Stafford that the old-fashioned Stafford loans that are subsidized or unsubsidized that directly came from a private bank but are federally guaranteed. So you should really be looking at that and checking to see if it makes sense for you to consolidate into a direct loan, because the FFEL loans and the Powell loans that came from schools, aren’t eligible for the way that an executive action would look. So people should really look to see if it makes sense to do a consolidation into the Direct Loan system.

What we can do is you can get the cancellation done for Direct Loans, which would be 33 million people would have their loans taken away, which is huge. A little signature on a piece of paper and 33 million people get a chance at a good feature. That’s a pretty cool work-to-output ratio. And then through legislation, we can tackle FFEL Loans, the Pell Loans, and then the private loans.

From there in that package, I would want to tie in free college for public schools going forward.

Nikki Nolan: I have heard a lot of, well, the taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear this burden. Do you have any sort of talking points for that?

Melissa Byrne: Well, we’ve already paid for it. The money for these student loans have already been appropriated, so that doesn’t cost anymore. And there’s been so much interest that’s been made off of these loans that we’re, we’re in a good spot for those.

And the folks that have debt, who are paying right now, $500, $800, a thousand dollars a month on their loans. They can take that and also have the debt load being taken off their, their credit report and their debt-to-income ratio. They can go and buy that first home. They can start that business. They can spend extra money in their community. And so you’ll see this ripple- because people aren’t going to be saving it, at least for a couple of years. People are going to be making up for lost time with purchases they weren’t able to do. And you’ll start seeing people being able to stabilize and save for retirement.

A big part of this is people who have the Plus Loans, which are the Parent Loans for undergraduate school. And so those are Direct Loans as well. So you’ll see people that are in their fifties and sixties and seventies, being able to have stabilized retirement.

And we don’t talk about as much, that a big growing portion of people with student loan debt or people that are retirees. Either their own debt they haven’t paid off or Plus Loans for their kids or grandkids.

You have – many, many seniors have gotten their social security benefits garnished for student loan debt. We’ve tried during the Obama administration to get him to exempt social security benefits from garnishment for student loan debt and his treasury secretary is just too lazy to do it.

Nikki Nolan: Oh, that’s awful. One thing that I want to cover, because you just talked about it a little bit earlier was that you can reconsolidate some of your FFEL Loans or Plus Loans into these Direct Loans. But it can take a few months to do that.

So, what are your sort of projections on when you think legislation might go through?

Melissa Byrne: Right now we have the loans are paused for interest in payments through at least September 30th of this year. So I really think that people should go and look at their loans. Look at how much time they have left to pay off. If they’re about to hit whatever market is that they would be getting the IBR forgiveness, which basically nobody is getting, then you might want to talk to somebody at ED to see if it makes sense. But otherwise consolidate. Take advantage of at least 10 months without having to make a payment and having a zero interest rate.

So what you could be doing in that time to basically protect yourself in case cancellation takes longer, is you can take whatever payment you are planning on making, put it into an interest, bearing savings account, and then just pay yourself every month. And then if say the loans do resume, which I don’t expect that they will. You could then make one big payment right on your principle. So when the loans resume, you would have a year’s worth of payment, at 10 months worth of payments that you just put on there, which would actually then drop your principal down a lot. That could make up for having a slightly higher interest rate.

Nikki Nolan: That makes sense. Yeah, ’cause when you reconsolidate, they add a 0.25% to the Direct Loans.

Melissa Byrne: Yeah, but if you’re having a zero interest rate- and the thing is, the loans have been paused for so long now that politically, I don’t see how you can restart them without creating a political crisis. And they also, the servicers don’t know how to restart them. And it’s going to be a mess.

So I think that the ethical thing, the moral thing, and the political thing is to just cancel them and, get the free college.

And there might be a gap of – might take a year to get free college. So you’ll have some people that are taking out loans in the meantime. So then do a second wave of cancellation. And going forward thinking about loan products to work for the actual student and for the parent, as opposed to being a profit center for the government.

So you could really just, if somebody needs a little bit of a loan for some housing when you’re at school, or if the best school for you as a private school, and this is the difference between the aid that you get versus the total cost, then your lending going forward is 0.1%. So just a .1% interest rate to cover just literally the cost of origination and collections, and have that be set on a five-year by 5%- for five years and then it’s canceled from there- to do an IDR that actually works well. So that way, we’re never setting this up because the current IDR is really, it’s 10% of your income for 20 years, which is just absurd.

Nikki Nolan: Yeah. It’s 20 for undergrad and twenty-five for graduate. So it’s even longer. If you go to grad school.

Melissa Byrne: And a lot of the graduate student debt is because the schools use graduate programs to fund their whole general fund. It’s absurd, it was made up by people who just weren’t there yet on the thinking of education being a right and not a gift from parents that children are a tool for a class. They wanted it to basically take away the ability for class and mobility.

Nikki Nolan: This is a good place cause we’re a mini episode, eh? I want to save a lot of this content for the longer episode. Is there anything that I haven’t, sort of, asked you about?

Melissa Byrne: I just think everybody needs to be taking action and sharing their story. I want people doing three things, one, you all should follow me on Twitter at M -C- B- Y- R- N- E. So you can keep updated on cool things to do around canceling student loan debt and making college free.

Now that we have a good person in the White House, I recommend that you go to whitehouse.gov and send an email to the president. I want his correspondence team to get 5,000 emails this week through that form letting people know their student loan story and why all the federal student loan debt should be canceled through EO. And then give your Senator a call. Make sure that your Senator and your Congress people are hearing from you on the phone, because they do track what they hear on the phones. And, we’re all stuck at home because of COVID so if every day you spent 10 minutes on the phone calling your elected’s (202) 224-3121 is the number, save it in your phone, give them a call every day and be, why aren’t my loans canceled yet? So that way they keep the fire on everybody.

And then if you don’t have student loan debt, talk to people that have student loan debt and ask them to speak out. And when you hear, if you don’t have debt, and you hear other people saying, well, I paid off my loan, so they should too. Be able to respond no, because everybody deserves justice and we all have to go forward together in a really good way.

Nikki Nolan: Well, we’ve come to the end. It was so lovely talking to you today.

Melissa Byrne: I know so great to talk to you. I am really excited about your project, exploring student loan debt.

Nikki Nolan:  Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me Nikki Nolan.

Special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio.

Additional support and thanks to Sarah Thibault  who writes the information and transcripts about each episode.

This podcast would not have been possible without them.

Visit our website for more information matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context of the subjects you just heard about, and subscribe- absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

 

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